The digital skills shortage just got serious, says Sagittarius

The Drum 11 Feb 2019 03:28

The Drum Network recently spoke to Ian MacArthur, director of global experience optimisation at Sagittarius, about the perfect storm gathering around the demand for digital marketing skills and what the snowballing skills shortage might mean for the agency sector.

What factors over the past decade (and particularly over the past 18 months) have led to the current digital skills shortage we face in the UK?

For ten years now our industry has been talking about the skills shortage. At the beginning it was something we referred to as the “rush to the middle”. This was created by the sudden realisation in Adland that agencies needed to be far more digital to stay ahead of the curve and therefore putting them in direct competition with the big tech brands when it came to securing talent. To compound this a wave of new start-ups like UberCab, AirBed & Breakfast and Picaboo (snapchat) were tempting new talent in a different direction. In total, demand was outstripping supply.

Fast forward to 2019 and the situation has become far worse. Entrepreneurship is at an all-time high with over 10% of UK companies launching as start-ups this year. New starters often expect a level of pay and flexibility that matches experience they don’t yet have – this can feed the exploitation of internship programmes.